With 66 days to go to election day, the campaign trail took a backseat to the criminal trial again yesterday and there’s a good chance that’s where it will find itself again today.

Drip, drip, drip: Chinese water torture is how Prime Minister Harper’s former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, once described the slow release of news stories about Senator Mike Duffy’s expenses over two years ago. He probably revisited that feeling on the stand yesterday in the face of relentless grilling by Duffy’s lawyer. As our Leslie MacKinnon reports, Donald Bayne accused Wright of not acting in a “moral” or “principled” way when he personally repaid Duffy’s disallowed expenses. Instead, Bayne insisted, Wright was conducting political damage control so the prime minister and his government wouldn’t be embarrassed, calling the narrative originally put forth by the PMO a “deliberately deceptive scenario.”

It turns out “the PMO knew early on Sen. Pamela Wallin could be asked to reimburse a substantial amount of her travel claims” and the emails released at Duffy’s trial show that she was warned against defending them all publicly. The Star’s Joanna Smith has the story.

Another Liberal premier has waded into the federal election fray, but this time the target is Tom Mulcair. New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant says the NDP leader’s position on the proposed Energy East pipeline is “very disappointing” and accused him of “wavering” on his support for it. As the Globe’s Jane Taber notes, Gallant also suggested that Mulcair’s position varies depending on where he is in the country.

In Alberta, they’re also swinging at Harper. The Conservative leader said this week that the province is drifting through the economic downturn, but Joe Ceci begs to differ. As Bob Weber reports, the New Democrat finance minister cited research that suggests the Conservatives have the worst job creation record since the Second World War, and also pointed out the federal Tories haven’t balanced a budget since 2008 and have added $150 billion in debt. “These kinds of results seem to be in their DNA,” Ceci said.

This just in: Stephen Harper’s opposition to Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory is so strong, he’s prepared to fight against it for some time, says Rob Nicholson. “Whether it takes 5 months or 50 years, under Prime Minister Harper’s leadership, Canada will never accept the illegal occupation of Ukrainian territory. Our position is clear: Vladimir Putin has to get out of Ukraine,” Nicholson was quoted as saying. Fifty years will put Harper into his hundreds. Now that’s commitment.

In British Columbia, it’s a story worthy of a cloak-and-dagger spy thriller. As Geordon Omand reports, a closed hearing tasked with determining whether CSIS crossed the legal line in eyeing anti-pipeline activists is so secretive that not even the lawyer representing the environmental groups can discuss with his clients anything that took place. “I use the word Kafkaesque, but you couldn’t write a play like this,” said Mike Horter, executive director of the Dogwood Initiative.

After debating throughout the night, this morning Greek MPs backed terms for a bailout deal. The BBC reports that PM Alexis Tsipras will seek a confidence vote next week. Eurozone ministers are set to discuss the bailout later today.

Meanwhile in Hillary Clinton’s camp, a memo has gone out to supporters in the wake of softening poll numbers and a surging Bernie Sanders, urging them not to panic. Keep calm and carry on, peeps.

In Featured Opinion:

Tasha Kheiriddin tries to puzzle out two things a recent poll tells us: first, that Stephen Harper and Tom Mulcair are neck-and-neck in terms of voters’ perceptions of their economic bona fides; and second, that the Liberals under Trudeau seem to have lost the fiscal credibility they earned at great cost during the Chretien/Martin years. He’s not helping himself by claiming the Liberals can grow the economy “from the heart out,” she says.

Of course, politicians still get sandbagged all the time for stating the obvious. Take NDP candidate Linda McQuaig’s recent assertion that much of the remaining oilsands bitumen will have to stay in the ground if Canada is to meet its carbon emissions targets. Atmospheric scientist Thomas J. Duck says she’s right; more importantly, he says, Canada is going to have to convince other oil-producing nations to scale down if we don’t want the Alberta oilsands to run out of rope.